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Ask HN: Review our startup - www.webnotes.net
38 points by peterlai on May 18, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 27 comments
After a year of work, WebNotes just launched its freemium product at www.webnotes.net. Would you guys mind reviewing our startup? Several significant changes have been made since our private beta launch six months ago:

* We are no longer in private beta mode. Anyone can sign up.

* We added WebNotes Pro which allows you to upload and annotate PDFs.

* We added WebNotes Group Solutions with allows schools and business to mass register for WebNotes

* We unveiled partnerships with several existing organizations. Our case studies are located here: http://www.webnotes.net/Press/CaseStudies.aspx

I would love to hear feedback.

P.S: We are based in Cambridge, MA. (Shout out to my Cambridge peers.)




Your site is too crowded. Give me one thing to look at on your main page. Right now, you have 'webnotes pro', 'sign up now', the play button, and your 'faster/more effective' drawing my attention, in that order. Read this:

http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/good-call-to-action-buttons/

Remove the red from wnp. You want the first noticeable thing to be the first step, and the first step should probably be 'find out what this does' - so make the 'faster and more effective web research' text stand out more. You have way too many tabs - give me little next and prev buttons to scroll features. I like playing with those, I hate tabs - I get the impression that I'll have to load a new page, so I avoid them. Preload the images on the other tabs. Your support tab/button doesn't actually link to support, it links to info. Your video seems to focus on many individual features, rather than on the problem that you're solving for me. Why do I want to save these notes? Why do I want to compile a report? (Clicking the blackness outside the modal video should return me to the page - I don't want to click that little black x)

Summary: very crowded main page, lacks obvious next-steps at all stages of interaction, presents individual features rather than a solution to my problems. Looks pretty good otherwise.


We are looking into making the next step more obvious, and we do agree that the homepage has a lot on it. Thanks for the feedback.


The demo is what sold me. Making that button more prominent would be a good start. I clicked it before I read anything else.


I think it's a great design and really well-laid out site. I understood immediately what it is you're doing. However, I don't have the problem that you're solving so I'm not that interested. I'm not a student though, so maybe that's more your target audience. For me, delicious is enough to organize info on the web.


Direct links for convenience:

http://www.webnotes.net

http://www.webnotes.net/Press/CaseStudies.aspx


As it happens, I am "in the market" for such a product ever since the demise of Google Notebook. Having given it a quick spin, I may consider using your product. The only immediate irritation is that it isn't obvious how to move an annotation from one folder to another in the sidebar; it looks like drag and drop should work but it doesn't. The documentation (ie the FAQ) didn't cover this either. Oh wait. I managed it somehow but bugger if I know how - I can't undo it. Ah. I see. You have to grab exactly the right part of the annotation - the title (Not the URL, Not the Favicon). The design doesn't lead you to this because all three are in the same grey box, making it look like one drag-n-drop unit.

This is my opinion only, but I think the price point for your premium service is too high. There are two reasons I pay for premium service: one, I really really want the extra feature; two, I have a really good feeling about the service and want to keep it alive. Ten bucks a month hits neither of those for me. In comparison, I pay toodledo.com $15 a year for a really important-to-me feature and awesome customer service. Looking at webnotes I would get by with the free features, but if I liked it, I would pay you $15/year even though I am not interested in PDFs. With your price point at $10/month, I'm just not going to. I mostly use this kind of service to collect and organise recipes - that is nowhere as big a deal to me as half my Netflix subscription, which is what $10/month comes to.

The .net address in unfortunate. People do type "webnotes" in their URL bar then get confused when they don't go where they intended. There is no obvious reason why this is a .net kind of site.

I get some overwrite issues on Firefox/Linux in the sidebar. Not a biggie.

Hope this was useful to you.


Your critique of the organizer was very useful. We're looking into improvements for the next iteration. Also, we've added this tutorial: http://www.webnotes.net/tutorial/tutorial.aspx. We hope you find it useful.


First off, that's a pretty k-rad design. Did you do it in-house or an outside firm?

I have a few questions/thoughts:

- What happens if the contents of a page change? Do the notes go away or do you try and follow the content as it moves around?

- Have you thought about public sharing of these notes? I don't know if it's in your business plan, but it could be a fun thing to be able to mark up pages on the web and see others' notes while browsing. Could get noisy and be a UI issue, but it sounds neat :)

- I might change the "Click to try demo" button to be a little bit more clear what's going to happen when you click it. It's a great demo that shows off your product perfectly, but I was thinking I would be sent off to some other page and might have to go into some registration process. Two ways to handle this: Show the bar dimmed out and a button that says "Activate demo" or something to that effect. Or have the links say something to the effect of "Try the demo live on this page" so we understand it's just something quick. Again, it's really effective, so you should remove any apprehension about clicking that link.


Wow, great questions, great feedback.

1. Design: We start with designs from 99designs.com. Then, we have Ryan (CEO and great with photoshop) heavily refine our selections. Afterwards, we convert the designs to html using psd2html services. Again, heavy refinement is needed before the code is actually usable. Here's a link to our previous design: http://blog.webnotes.net/image.axd?picture=webnotesnet.jpg

2. If the contents of the page change, we first try to relocate your highlights/notes. If your highlighted texts have disappeared, we add a "page changed" notification at the bottom of the screen which contains the text you originally highlighted.

3. We do think about public sharing of notes, though our primary focus is on improving research. Several other sites have focused upon social annotations without great success, and so we hesitate when considering such options. Also, the UI does seem tricky. If we were to implement more sharing-related features (you can already share annotated pages through email or permalink), UI would be of utmost importance to us. Several of our engineers have taken usability classes (6.831 was awesome!), and we pride ourselves in the simplicity of our product.

4. We are looking into implementing your suggestions. Thanks for pointing this out.


I also love your design. Would love to know who you used.


I agree with imp regarding the site design and layout. I am a graduate student and have been looking for a software/service similar to papers for mac (http://mekentosj.com/papers/) for windows. This looks like a useful service, not entirely what I want but a decent start. I will definitely try the free version and will post my opinion.


So right now I'm a PhD student and doing quite a bit of research for my proposal.

Maybe I'm unique, but if I'm doing reading online, I don't exactly care about highlighting. If I come across something important, I just bookmark it. If it's a PDF, I download it.

So I'm not really sure your solution is that important (to me atleast).

In my opinion, there are much bigger hassles, with doing research online (these may not apply to you, but I'll tell you nonetheless):

- Where can I go to get FREE PDFs of articles? - If I make a note of why the PDF is important, can I download that note...so I'm reminded when I actually start writing the report? - How can I easily keep track of certain authors? - How can I easily contact the authors in published articles?

So in summary: Not sure if your product is really worth $5/mnth. If you came up with an option that compiled all the contact information for each PDF, then it might make this tool more valuable. -


Webnotes Pro: PDF Annotation - Up to 500 MB (about 2,500 PDFs)

The typical .pdf I encounter is a lot larger than 200k. What else...ah, the pins on sticky notes caused instant cognitive dissonance. As did the pins on highlighting...maybe just lose the damn pins.

I like it. I don't see myself paying for it. But I would encourage others to use it.


It looks like your marketing/PR guy did good work. I'm impressed by the amount of press you've garnered.


Shout out to Tracy Wemett and Alex King for the great marketing. Alex has been with WebNotes since September of last year and has helped with the refining our our messaging. Our previous tag line was "Annotate, Organize, Share" and was so generic, it failed to differentiate us within the annotation space. Alex King lead the PR push six months ago for our private launch. Tracy Wemett heads our current public launch.


Any plans to support tags? Would be nice to have folder plus tags for organizing info.


Several people have requested tags and other related improvements to the notes organizer. These requests are of high priority in the next few iterations. Thanks for the suggestion!


so far i like everything about it. key points (1) found all the info about the service i was looking for real fast, and my patience level is low for the review my site stuff (2) fast and simple registration (3) encouraged me to try it out since i didnt even have to pay (4) the privacy policy was easy to find and understand [first question was if you were watching my browsing beyond what i want to highlight] and you don't -- i'm going to use this app for a bit and see how it goes.

i also like how clear you made the advantages of the app, the testimonials, and just the overall how much information i get easily.

great job.


I didn't get what the site did, it looked like it was trying to sell me something. Then I saw the button 'Download' and that turned me off. I don't want to install any software. I cannot see how this is supposed to save me time or money as claimed.

The sign up page took 15 seconds to load so I gave up at that point.

Online note taking isn't a problem I have that needs a solution.

Doesn't google do this already and integrated into my goole suite of tools?


Why oh why did I not hear about you when I was working on my senior thesis. I have been using Zotero which is pretty good for bibliografies, but keeping track of my research across all my tabs and browsers, plus pdf's I download from JSTOR, Google Scholar, has always been a pain. I will use this when researching for blog posts and sharing with my journalists. Good job!


Read the comments here first, went to check it out; typed in "www.webnotes.com" and ended up at some very strange site. Came back here, and couldn't believe that you were trying to do something with a "reasonable-sounding" domain name for which someone else has the .com. I predict this will be a big problem.


Koodos on the product. I am curious, what tool/utility did u use to create the demo clip?

Best of Luck ! :)


Thanks for the complements. Unfortunately, I don't know what tool/utility we used for the screencast. I do enjoy Jing though.


It's extremely simple to use. I could go right in and play with the demo document. I also don't have this need immediately, but your site will stick in my mind in case I need it later...


Quite a team you have assembled. Looks like a great product, looks like it will go far. Good luck.


very good design


Great idea, superb execution.




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